Yes I can help you setup a project with a blog.
First I’d say get a base site setup with minima theme and a folder called _posts, which is the Jekyll way. You can use my project here to view a live or create a template or just look at the structure of the repo.
Update the config so it uses your own public URL and title. Note you can set baseurl to be "" as empty string since you don’t want a sub path.
Next, create a page called blog.md at the root. Use layout as default.html or page.html
Don’t put it in the posts folder. On this page you can put a blog feed similar to my site’s homepage which shows excerpts of posts. You can make your homepage look different.
If that builds fine, then you can continue.
The blog listing will be served as /blog.html and the posts will be under name like /2020-02-10-my-title.html by default. If you really want, you can change permalink attribute on blog.md to be /blog/ and change posts to be on /blog/2020-02-10-my-title.html but this is not typical setup and takes work. I think the post path is set in config. You’ll have to look up post permalink.
Finally you can change Gemfile and config to use freelancer.